Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

How we make these announcements will not make much difference because it will get into the public ether that the Government is successful and the economy is buoyant. These are the basics. We cannot get away from them. The economy is buoyant and we are concentrating spending in the key social areas such as health, education and social welfare, in which I am sure the Labour Party has a tradition and policy. Envy will be a destructive force if it is allowed to take over. The Government has done a great deal in these areas.

In regard to health, it begins as a soundbite and becomes a policy to try to drill it into the public mind that there is a huge number of administrative staff employed in the health service. Eventually it becomes a cliché to which people are sick and tired of listening. It is a cliché that only frontline staff are working and the 35,000 additional staff in the health service are in their offices listening to Joe Duffy on the radio, reading the newspapers, drinking coffee and not doing very much. This is the current cliché but the public are discerning enough to be able to distinguish the rubbish from the facts. These people are working hard. Frontline staff cannot deliver services without proper back-up, to which the Government is committed.

One need only examine the expansions in the medical card scheme in recent years. Millions of Irish people will benefit from this generosity. The Minister for Health and Children recently announced a 20% increase in the provision of medical cards. Last year, when a GP only scheme was announced, Deputy Rabbitte amusingly referred to them as yellow-pack. I can only compare it to his role in Cabinet when he was a yellow-pack Minister. Perhaps this is what he was thinking about.

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